Let me explain...if the product team doesn't have one of the fancy, expensive tools, then your next best bet is to start your code review out by copying whatever code you are looking at into your favorite text editor or Microsoft Word (or something similar).

Then, the review starts by the reviewer highlighting code in Word and adding comments to it, which may, at times, be hard to find and be difficult to understand. After the review is done, the Word document is emailed to the reviewee and they sit down in a meeting room or at a desk and talk over the review. If there are any times they need to refer to the actual code they must go back to the IDE and search for the code and any supporting information they need, which could take extra time.

Once the review is done, the reviewee must take the Word document back to their desk, find all of the code - AGAIN - and try to decifer any notes they had taken during the meeting and translate that back to the code.

Finally, after all of this, the historical peer review document (with all of its notes and comments) is usually discarded and/or lost on someone's hard disk never to see the light of day again - hence losing all record that a peer review ever took place.

If this sound familiar...read on...

How can Spectare improve your peer code review process?

Simple! Let's go through that peer code review process again...this time with Spectare...

First, to start the peer review, there is no more creating a Word Document for every code module you want to review. You simply start up Spectare in the Visual Studio IDE. Then, you start to navigate through the code you are reviewing. If you see something that needs a comment, simply highlight it and add a Spectare comment.

This action will create a Review file and (in most cases) attach it right to the Visual Studio code file in the solution. Then, the comment with the associated code is shown in the Spectare window. You can peruse as many code files as you like adding comments throughout them at will.

Once you are done, your solution will have a number of Review files attached. You will need to check those items in via your source code tool of choice. Once you have done this, your Review files are now accessible to the reviewee.

The reviewee can now go through the source code files and examine all of the comments that were added...no translations between Word and code - all done within the IDE. While meeting with the reviewer, notes can be added in real-time to each of the review comments. Once the meeting is over, all of the notes and comments are easy to find easily accessible - the code changes can be made easily with minimal confusion and questions.

Finally, since the review comments and notes are all attached within the solution, the review information is kept for historical and auditing purposes. Your project manager or audit manager will never have to wonder IF the code is being reviewed as it should be. It will all be documented there for you - automatically.